Slack is struggling to get back to work

A Slack outage has once again soured the start of the work day. Slack is reporting a partial failure that has affected many users starting around 9:30AM ET. Simply speaking, the chat service is "not loading" for some — if there was an important virtual huddle this morning, you might have missed it. Some of us at Engadget haven't had problems, but others have been locked out completely.

We've asked Slack for comment. In its status updates, Slack said it was "investigating" the problem and was working on a "full resolution."

Slack has had a few outages in the past two years. They've typically been short, and in at least one case was caused by an Amazon Web Services failure rather than Slack itself. Still, these disruptions aren't exactly minor in an era when virtual work is more important than ever — they may prompt companies to scramble for backups, and in some cases create very real headaches.